The Arab-Israeli region of the Middle East is filled with rumors of war. That is about as unusual as the rising of the sun, so normally it would not be worth mentioning. But like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, such rumors occasionally will be true. In this case, we dont know that they are true, and certainly its not the rumors that are driving us. But other things  minor and readily explicable individually  have drawn our attention to the possibility that something is happening.

SNIP

Rumors now are swirling that the Israelis are about to reveal publicly they bombed a nuclear reactor provided to Syria by North Korea. But this news isnt all that big. Also rumored is that the Israelis will claim Iranian complicity in building the reactor. One Israeli TV station reported April 8 that Israel really had discovered Saddam Husseins weapons of mass destruction, which it said had been smuggled to Syria.

Why the Bush administration wouldnt have trumpeted news of the Syrian reactor worldwide in September 2007 is beyond us, but there obviously were some reasons  assuming the TV report is true, which we have no way of establishing. In fact, we have no idea why the Israelis are choosing this moment to rehash the bombing of this site.... More

The bombing of Syria symbolizes our confusion. Why would Syria want a nuclear reactor and why put it on the border of Turkey, a country the Syrians arent particularly friendly with? If the Syrians had a nuclear reactor, why would the Israelis be coy about it? Why would the Americans? Having said nothing for months apart from careful leaks, why are the Israelis going to speak publicly now? And if what they are going to say is simply that the North Koreans provided the equipment, whats the big deal? That was leaked months ago.

The events of September 2007 make no sense and have never made any sense. The events we have seen since February make no sense either. That is noteworthy, and we bring it to your attention. We are not saying that the events are meaningless. We are saying that we do not know their meaning. But we cant help but regard them as ominous.

I don’t see any difficulty explaining why Israel would have waited 7 months to say much about the bombing of the Syrian reactor site (if indeed they are about to say something). In the initials days after the bombing they would have been waiting to closely assess they Syrian reaction, international issues, etc. They actually had no reason to make a big deal of it at the time unless they wanted to increase the likelihood of a war with Syria (which they would win, of course, but there is no reason to think that Israel’s current leaders were looking for a war with Syria). IF there had been much comment from Israel at the time, it would have increased pressure on Assad’s regime to respond militarily or else “lose face”..... as it is everyone knows Syria had its butt kicked, but without the most explicit public humiliation that Assad could no longer ignore.

If Israel does come out with info now, whether for their own reasons or due to US needs/pressures, they have judged that the bombing is enough in the past that Assad will not immediately ratchet up to a shooting war over it. Again, no one doubts that Israel can kick Syria’s butt any moment of the year, but they do not want to go to the trouble and expense of actually doing so unless there is an absolutely compelling and urgent reason.

All: Read Charlie Wilson's War. This will give you deep insight into why things are not made public. For ex., CHINA was feeding the Afghans weapons vs. the Russians! The U.S. was funneling weapons via Saudi Arabia through Pakistan to the mujahadeen. But NO WEAPON could be proven to have originated in the U.S. We even had some weapons (not rifles) that we made, but which had no US markings at all and could not be traced here.

Best part: Wilson negotiated a deal for the Israelis to supply weapons to the muj via Pakistan!! The catch was, there could be no stars of David on the shipping crates.

Despite rulings by the lawyers at the CIA which said that we could not ship sniper rifles to the muj, Gust Avrakotos shipped them anyway, under the designation, "special viewing devices."

The Paks and Saudies COULD NOT be seen by their people as working with the Jews, even to liberate Afghanistan from the Reds; the U.S. was told behind the scenes that any direct US aid found coming from Pakistan would result in the Russkies taking out Pakistan, possibly through India and her nukes!!

Starting to get the picture?

There are any number of plausible scenarios for why the WMDs in Iraq a) were not intercepted when they were first moved, and b) acknowledged after they arrived in (probably) Syria. For one thing, the US would have had to invade Syria---and the public simply wasn't ready for that. Perhaps---just perhaps, I don't know---Bush knew that if they got to Syria, the Israelis would at a convenient moment take care of our problem.

One line stood out in Charlie Wilson's War: Gust noted that the very best spy programs are the ones the reporters think haven't worked. And the spies will never publicly claim credit. Gust only did so about Afghanistan some 15 years later. This is critical to keep in mind: what ever the press thinks it is "telling us" about the situation, it is almost certainly wrong.

7
posted on 04/08/2008 7:23:36 PM PDT
by LS
(CNN is the Amtrak of News)

“Why the Bush administration wouldnt have trumpeted news of the Syrian reactor worldwide in September 2007 is beyond us, but there obviously were some reasons  assuming the TV report is true, which we have no way of establishing. In fact, we have no idea why the Israelis are choosing this moment to rehash the bombing of this site.... More”

There is a very good reason why the US didn’t announce to the world that it found Saddams WMD. Let’s say we did. NOw let’s say Al Queada put out a press release saying they knew this and took a few tons of stuff and are going to use it against US interests. What would the RATS say? That George Bush put the US in danger.

It was a no win for the administration and they believed that it would be easier to beat Kerry with the “No WMD” argument rather then the “Bush put us all in danger” argument.

100’s of 18 wheel trucks do not mysteriously vanish in to the night. To think otherwise would be naive. My bet is even the Syrians wanted the crap gone.

Imagine what would happen to the Democrat party if Obama or Hillary is elected and all of a sudden one of Saddams WMD’s makes its way to the US. They blamed Bush for invading on a false premise and now it was true.

Apr 7, 2008 21:57
‘Report on Sept. 6 strike to show Saddam transferred WMDs to Syria’
By JPOST.COM STAFF
An upcoming joint US-Israel report on the September 6 IAF strike on a Syrian facility will claim that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein transferred weapons of mass destruction to the country, Channel 2 stated Monday.

According to Secretary of State Robert Gates 1997 book “From the Shadows” the CIA started giving aid to Islamic rebels in Afghanistan six months before the Soviets invaded. This was confirmed and detailed in an interview with Zbignew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor in 1998 in the French journal Le Nouvel Observateur. In the interview Brzezinski explained that Jimmy Carter signed an order on July 3 of 1979 to give aid to the mujahadeen and that he (Brzezinski) wrote Carter a note that same day saying “this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention”.

Not that Brzezinski objected. To the contrary this is how he answered his interviewer’s question on whether he had any regrets. “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”

Bekka Valley - it's long been assumed that's where the WMD ended up - and if so, they wouldn't risk moving them as satellite would pick it up...so they well may still be there.

I would love to see the faces of the traitorous libRats if the whole thing unravels in their faces long about convention time...They would never recover.And they have yet to learn they shouldn't play poker with that Texan = he knows how to hold 'em.

25
posted on 04/08/2008 8:02:38 PM PDT
by maine-iac7
("...but you can't fool all of the people all of the time" LINCOLN)

Why the Bush administration wouldnt have trumpeted news of the Syrian reactor worldwide in September 2007 is beyond us, but there obviously were some reasons

My theory is that France, Germany and Russia were involved up to their eyeballs with Saddams WMD's. The reason those three suddenly dug in their heels at the UN in the runup to Desert Storm II was to buy time to erase their fingerprints in Iraq.

We aren't talking about the stockpiles of inefficient WWI era chemical weapons we all have seen photos of. Modern chem-bio's are extraordinarily lethal in small quantity. Remember the missing +2K liters of Iraqi anthrax? That would fit in the back of one UHaul truck. A few convoys of 18 wheelers should have had no difficulty transporting the entire production facilities and inventory out of Iraq.

If the Russians went to the trouble of providing Spec-Op's to escort the convoys out of Iraq, they probably also added a few diplomats to provide diplomatic immunity to the convoys as well. Remember just after the commencement of hostilities that a convoy was strafed which we were told was a "Russian diplomatic convoy"?

I suspect after sanitizing Iraq, Russia, Germany and France recommended to #10 and the WH because their cooperation would be needed in the future, it would be best to put this matter behind us.

If the WMD's were stored in Syria, I can understand waiting to be certain before attacking the sites.

The only thing that puzzles me is that all the reports had the convoys final destination being Syria or Lebanon. If the russians really did go to all that trouble, why didn't the convoys go to one of the Syrian ports where the goods would have been loaded onto Russian warships for safe passage to Russia?

>>>>In the second year after the Soviet withdrawal, Wilson delivered another $250 million for the CIA to keep its Afghan program intact. With Saudi matching funds, the mujahideen would receive another half a billion dollars to wage war.<<<

Last Thursday, the Israeli Air Force penetrated deeply into Syrian territory and apparently bombed an Iranian arms shipment that was being transferred to Hizbullah.

However, there is something wrong with this picture.

Iran are constantly arming Hizbullah. It’s non-stop. Why would Israel suddenly spring into action and fly over Turkey then penetrate so deeply into Syrian that the IAF were just a few miles from the Iraqi border?

The intel for this raid has been building for months. Security was top-level. The raid was perfectly planned, split-second timing was crucial; this was a daring attack, extremely dangerous and carried potentially serious international blow back.

In truth, Israel had no choice.

The North Koreans have been selling nuclear material to the Syrians. And this cannot stand.

Sounds like the writer assumes most of us read all the reports back in the beginning of the long truck convoy, caught on aerial, out of Iraq and the airlift - and the reports by some of those involved that this was a mass-movement of Saddam's WMD's = and that much ended up in Bekka Valley.,

For anyone who had their head in the sand or the bias blocker on back then, there are copious articles on the net - but just for sh*ts and giggles, here's one that mentions the tie in with this article:

http://www.probush.com/ryan_wmd_question.htm

excerpt: "The bulk of the weapons would later be transferred between January and March 2003 from Baghdad, Tikrit and al-Qaim. Some would be stored among Syria's own weapons, particularly at an army base north of Damascus, while the rest was shipped to Lebanon's Bekka Valley, where they were put in holes 20-26 feet across and 82-115 feet deep. The holes were dug in poppy and cotton fields, in the valley stretching between Jabal Akroum, the town of al-Qbayyat and the Syrian border. Weapons were also hidden at the area between the towns of al-Hirmil and al-Labwah between the Orontes River and the Syrian border. According to several sources, Israeli satellite photos were given to the West prove this.

Sometimes, unless one is unwilling to loosen their bias blocker, it's educational to do a bit of research before opining.

Sorry - I don’t believe the “we’ve found Saddam’s weapons” part of this thing. He may indeed have moved his chemical, bio or nuclear weapons - but then, where are the facilities that go with them? We certainly would have found the tens of thousands of centrifuges or massive clean-rooms and obvious production plants for the bio-weapons.

About 6 months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan there was a brief report in Science (magazine) that a major deposit of gallium arsenide had been found in a mountain just North of Kabul by a Soviet survey team.

I always figured the folks running Afghanistan weren't able to come up with a price the Russians were willing to meet, so they decided to take it by force ~ and did so.

Not only was this site bombed, there were reports of ground forces removing something from the site. Those forces may have been more than IDF and could well have included American operatives. What is certain is that what ever was attacked was important and as covert as such things can be. My bet is that a nuke or parts of one were seized to keep the Syrians/Iranians from assembling a bomb. Was N. Korea the sole source of this stuff? ...I would suppose Saddam’s WMDs were also part of this. Why the silence by the Administration? Perhaps to keep information sources secure.

40
posted on 04/08/2008 8:30:00 PM PDT
by The Great RJ
("Mir we bleiwen wat mir sin" or "We want to remain what we are." ..Luxembourg motto)

The Arab-Israeli region of the Middle East is filled with rumors of war. That is about as unusual as the rising of the sun, so normally it would not be worth mentioning. But like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, such rumors occasionally will be true.

“Imagine what would happen to the Democrat party if Obama or Hillary is elected and all of a sudden one of Saddams WMDs makes its way to the US. They blamed Bush for invading on a false premise and now it was true.

The Democrat party would be dead.”

.....

That is far too much to hope for.

The media would never let it play out that way.
Stick to the “facts”, sir.
It would be Bush’s fault ... regardless of anything.

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